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10 November 2009

I’m a big baseball fan, making me part of the core audience for TV’s “MLB Network” that launched last January. One of my favorite shows is called “Prime 9,” featuring a run-down of the nine best center fielders of all time, the nine biggest home runs, and so on. The show’s motto is, “Designed to start arguments, not settle them.”If I had to choose a slogan for my new book The Future Church, I’d probably end up with something a lot like that.The book is my attempt to describe the ten most important trends shaping the future of the Catholic Church, on a global scale. My choices are the product of almost two decades of reporting, and hundreds of hours of interviews with bishops, priests, religious women and men, and laity all over the Catholic world. They’re not styled as my personal vision for the future, but rather a reporter’s effort to capture those forces which really are most significant today, whatever I (or anyone else) might think about them.